WW Faculty on Poetry Daily

This April, three MFA program faculty members are among the 21 poets providing brief essays on single poems for Poetry Daily’s annual Poetry Month feature, “Poet’s Picks”:

In April, in celebration of Poetry Month and our annual fund drive, Poetry Daily has asked 21 poets to select poems to be delivered to their readers by e-mail Monday through Friday of each week in April — their favorites from among The Greats — and to add their comments on the poems. Among the contributors are Warren Wilson MFA faculty members Jennifer Grotz, Mary Szybist, and Debra Allbery.  If you would like to receive this month’s “Poet’s Picks,” please sign up for Poetry Daily’s email newsletter.  (If you don’t want to receive the weekly newsletter after April, it’s easy to unsubscribe.)

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Rick Barot in Poetry

Warren Wilson faculty member Rick Barot’s new poem “The Wooden Overcoat” appears in the April 2012 issue of Poetry

The Wooden Overcoat

By Rick Barot

It turns out there’s a difference between a detail

and an image. If the dandelion on the sidewalk is

mere detail, the dandelion inked on a friend’s bicep

is an image because it moves when her body does,

even when a shirt covers the little thorny black sun

on a thin stalk. The same way that the bar code

on the back of another friend’s neck is just a detail,

until you hear that the row of numbers underneath

are the numbers his grandfather got on his arm

in a camp in Poland. Then it’s an image, something

activated in the reader’s senses beyond mere fact.

I know the difference doesn’t matter, except in poetry,  ….[Keep Reading]…

Rick is the author of the poetry collections Want (2008) and The Darker Fall (2002).

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An Interview with Dean Bakopoulos

Warren Wilson faculty member Dean Bakopoulos was recently interviewed on the SmartMoney blog “Pay Dirt.”:

[Your character] Zeke spends a lot of time in Starbucks. What’s the appeal to him?

For Zeke, it’s a manufactured community. He pretends he’s avant-garde and a lone wolf, but he finds so much comfort in predictability and mediocrity. Starbucks always has exactly what I want, too. I feel so cheap and easy. I live in a town where there’s no Starbucks at all. I now have a favorite independent coffee shop. But I was driving through rural Tennessee a while ago and I felt so alone in the world. Then I saw Starbucks and felt reassured. There’s something about the music Starbucks plays and the color choices that say, ‘It’s going to be okay.’  …[Read the full interview here]…

Dean is the author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon (2006, Mariner Books), and My American Unhappiness (2011, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).


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A. Van Jordan at Poetry Daily

Warren Wilson alumni and faculty member A. Van Jordan’s new poem “Do the Right Thing” is online at Poetry Daily:

Do the Right Thing

    (Spike Lee, 1989)

The days were a skillet on a red-hot eye of a stove.
The men on the corner, the couple in their apartment,
the kids playing under a fire hydrant’s relief
were all sitting, loving, or playing in a skillet.

Heat rose off the assonance of summer language.
Some called it music; others called it fire.
The days were a skillet but the nights were a match
lighting the gas. No moon appeared, only steam

rising off the sidewalks from the day. Feet
danced on the skillet, and smoke alarms sounded...[Keep Reading]…

Jordan’s newest collection Quantum Lyrics (2009, W.W. Norton) explores cultural identity by moving among historical, fictional, and autobiographical figures.  “Do the Right Thing” originally appeared in the Winter 2012 issue of Michigan Quarterly.

You can also hear Jordan reading “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,” from the same collection, at Poetry Out Loud.

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The New Yorker Interviews Fiction Writer Antonya Nelson

Deborah Treisman, fiction editor at The New Yorker, recently spoke with Warren Wilson faculty member Antonya Nelson about her new short story, “Chapter Two,” which appears in the March 26 issue of the magazine:

Do you think that A.A.—and other groups like it—are rich territory for fictional narrative?

My siblings, who are psychologists, are treated every day to a rich variety of “true stories.” The charge of sitting before a group of people—or a single person, as in the shrink’s office—and fashioning a narrative that both entertains and conforms to a manageable time frame seems like exactly the kind of thing that makes a short story possible.

Read the complete interview at thenewyorker.com.

 

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Laura Kasischke Wins National Book Critics Circle Award

Faculty member Laura Kasischke  has won the  2012 National Book Critics Circle Book Award for Poetry for her collection Space, In Chains (2011, Copper Canyon Press).  The board called the book “…a formally inventive work that speaks to the horrors and delights of ordinary life in an utterly original way.”

You can read one of Laura’s recent poems in Willow Springs Issue 65.

 

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In Case You Missed It…

Here’s faculty member Alan Shapiro’s interview on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition”

“Writing is a way of being happy even if what you’re writing about is how unhappy you are.  Not in a therapeutic sense, but in the sense that you get to convert things that you have to in life, perhaps, passively suffer into something that you can actively make on the page and so it can give you some sense of agency, power.”

Alan is the author of Broadway Baby (2012, Algonquin) and Night of the Republic (2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

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“The Beginning of the Brontes”

Warren Wilson faculty Margot Livesey on the life of Charlotte Bronte:

None of the Bronte’s work would have seen the light of day had it not been for Charlotte. At the age of twenty she wrote to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, sending him some of her poems and professing not merely a desire to write but “to be for ever known.”

Margot Livesey’s most recent work is The Flight of Gemma Hardy: A Novel (2012, Harper), which is loosely based on Bronte’s Jane Eyre.

You can read her interview about the novel at Bookpage.

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Reviews of Mark Doty and Dean Young’s “Art of” Installments

For the past five years, Graywolf Press has been releasing instructional titles under its Art of series, each pocket-sized guide an exploration of one writer’s thoughts on a “key, but sometimes neglected, aspect of creative writing.”

Jeremy Bass (poetry, 2010) reviews Warren Wilson faculty Mark Doty’s The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction and Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction.

 

Read the review at KROnline.

 

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Interview with C. Dale Young

Justin Bigos (poetry ’08) interviews faculty member C. Dale Young at The American Literary Review.

“As a physician, I am keenly aware of the words that come out of my mouth. I never lie to a patient, but always I must be aware that how I phrase something can have a remarkable impact on the person in front of me. To me, the poet has a responsibility to the poem. I don’t believe getting the draft down on paper is writing. To me, that is just getting the raw materials in front of you. The real work of writing is in what many call revision. I feel my responsibility is to sit with the draft and be open to possibilities. Many times, I want to just get the poem done. But poems are never really finished. And that desire to get it done quickly often forecloses greater possibilities for the poem. The only responsibility I feel as a poet is to sitting and being open, to really look and look again, which is exactly what revision means…

C. Dale is the author of Torn (2011, Four Way Press).  He blogs at Avoiding the Muse.

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